Jacksonville Director Retires Amid Growing Controversy

Jacksonville Director Retires Amid Growing Controversy

After nearly seven years of service, Jacksonville (Fla.) Public Library Director Ken Sivulich announced his retirement February 12, immediately vacating the office and recommending that the library board appoint Deputy Director Carolyn Williams, who has been with the system for 23 years, as interim director.

Sivulich said in the February 13 Jacksonville Florida Times-Union that Steve Rosenbloom, who took over as board chairman July 1, issued an ultimatum that he retire or risk being fired, citing Sivulich’s management style as one of the reasons for the request. “I made a decision that I was not going to spend the second half of my chairmanship trying to mend fences between the director and the administration,” Rosenbloom told the Times-Union.

Sivulich’s retirement comes a month after Mayor John Peyton ordered a hiring freeze on all library management and top-level positions as a result of a 2003 study that questioned library spending.

Sivulich will receive his full salary through April 30. In May, he is expected to begin a seven-month position as city consultant to spearhead the completion of a new main library, six branches, and the renovation and expansion of 12 other branches announced October 2003 as part of the Better Jacksonville Plan.

Posted February 20, 2004.

Latest Library Links

3h

YALSA will turn over its @yalsaTwitter account to a different partner each day of Teen Tech Week, March 8–14. Partners will include 3D Systems, ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy, Best Buy’s Geek Squad, Google Education, and Make It @ your library.

StoryCorps, in partnership with the ALA Public Programs Office, will hold a one-day workshop on June 26, during the 2015 ALA Annual Conference in San Francisco, for library professionals interested in offering projects inspired by StoryCorps at their institutions.

Kelly Jensen offers 13 more excellent literary prints to spice up your library walls, cubicles, bookshelf ends, or other blank spaces. Here are some others from last month. And ALA has quite a few as well.

Google announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on March 2 that it will begin “experimenting” with wireless services and the way we use them. As Wired’s Cade Metz comments, “Such Google experiments have a way of morphing into something far bigger, particularly when they involve tinkering with the infrastructure that drives the internet.”